Perception of Social Norms and Political Advocacy: Evidence from Rural Tanzania

• In Event: Experiments on Social Norms and Identity

Abstract

I investigate how information about the true norm of early marriage within a community increases the likelihood of villagers to speak-up for the abolition of the practice, and I use this specific case to build a generalized argument about how the (mis)perception of social norms affects political behavior in the rural Global South.
First, I document widespread misperceptions: even within such small, compact, and isolated communities where early marriage is widespread, while most people believe that others believe that early marriage is acceptable (i.e., perception of norm is conservative), the average rates of opposition to early marriage are extremely high (i.e., the norm is progressive). This same patter is also observable for norms related to safety, participation to justice, as well as environmental protection.
Then, I formalize the relationship between norms' perceptions and advocacy in an individual decision-making framework.
I show through a field-based survey experiment that receiving private information about the true rates of rejection of early marriage makes individuals more likely to speak up against the practice in a recorded message to be shared with the local politician or the local radio. Then, I use the generalized method of moments to estimate a parametric version of the model with my experimental data in order to (1) parse out why this information works, and differentiate between a theory of social learning and one of reputational concerns, and (2) simulate counterfactuals of what advocacy could look like across a range of social issues should norms’ perceptions be corrected.

Author

• Beatrice Montano, Columbia University